A Card With No Subject

The second week of January, and the dining table has disappeared under report cards.

Twenty-six of them, second grade, spread out in three rows with the sticky notes she uses to keep track of who she has finished. There is cocoa going cold at her elbow because she made it at eight and forgot it, and the dishwasher is done but nobody is going to empty it tonight. Outside it is the kind of cold that makes the storm door stick.

She is good at this and she does not rush it. Reading level, with the letter and the little arrow beside it. Number sense. Writing, which for a seven year old means whether the letters sit on the line and whether the story has anything in it besides a dog. Then the column at the bottom that the district calls Learning Behaviors, where she checks boxes: follows directions, works well with others, perseveres with a difficult task.

She writes real comments, not the four sentences everybody uses. She knows which boy has started reading in the hallway on his own, and she puts it in, because a parent should get one paragraph a year that proves somebody was actually watching their child.

It is somewhere around the eleventh card that the thought arrives, and it does not leave.

If there were a card for her, what would the subjects be.

Not for the teaching. That one exists; it is called an evaluation and she gets it in March. She means the other one. Twenty-nine years of following Jesus. If somebody sat down at this table with a blank card and had to fill in the boxes for who she is becoming, what would be printed down the left hand side.

She sits with the pen not moving. And what comes to her is not a list of subjects at all. It is a list of things she does less than she used to. She gossips less. She is less sharp with her sister. She has not screamed in a car in about four years.

Every single item is a subtraction. Not one of them is a thing she is becoming. She could tell you exactly what she is trying to stop being, in detail, with dates, and she could not tell you in one sentence what she is supposed to be turning into.

She caps the pen and looks at twenty-six cards, all of which know what they are measuring.

And you have sat at that table too, whether or not it had report cards on it. Ask you what needs fixing in you and the answer comes fast and it comes with examples. Ask you what you are being made into and the room goes quiet, because nobody ever printed the subjects down the side of that one.

What a card can hold and what it cannot

A report card is an honest instrument and I am not going to insult it. It measures what can be measured, in a child, in a year, against the same thing in September. Whether a seven year old can stay with a hard task for eleven minutes instead of four is a real fact about that child, and a parent deserves to know it.

But notice what a card is built for. Discrete things. Separable things. Things that can be counted without reference to the person doing them.

And a likeness is not that kind of thing. Nobody has ever described a face by scoring its parts. Measure a nose to the millimeter and a mouth to the millimeter and the drawing still looks like nobody on earth, because the resemblance was never located in the measurements.

You are being made into a likeness rather than a score, and that is why the boxes came up empty. Scripture says we are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another by the Lord who is the Spirit, which is language for a face and not for a grid; the Spirit is doing that work in a woman at a dining table who cannot name one subject to write down.

Now look again at the list that came to you, the one made of subtractions. Gossips less. Sharper less often. Four years since the car. Those are true and they cost something, and I will not wave them off.

They are also, every one of them, a description of an absence. You have never once been defined by the things you have stopped doing, whatever the tally in your head says at eleven at night. The written word does not describe a saint that way anywhere, and it is the Spirit and not a subtraction column who produces what Galatians 5 calls fruit, a word chosen because fruit is something that appears rather than something that vacates.

The one mark He named

Here is the strange thing. Jesus did name a mark. On the last night, in a room, with the towel not long put down.

A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.John 13:34-35

One mark. Not a syllabus. He does not say they will know you by your reading level in the epistles, or your attendance, or the things you have quit. Love, and specifically love of a particular shape: as I have loved you.

You are marked already by the one thing He said would identify His people, and it was never assembled by you out of good intentions. Romans 5 says the love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us, and poured is not a word for something a person manufactures at a dining table at nine at night.

And watch what that standard actually does to the checklist. As I have loved you is not a level to reach. It is a person to look at. The measure is Him: the way He was with the woman everybody had already decided about, the way He asked questions He knew the answer to so somebody could hear themselves say it, the way He fed people before He taught them because they were hungry.

That is not a behavior you can install. It is a person you resemble, more and more, without being able to point at the moment it started happening.

You have been handed the love itself and not a rule about loving. The command in John 13 rests on a supply that was given first, and it is His Spirit, poured out and not worked up, who is the reason any of it comes out of an ordinary woman on an ordinary Tuesday.

What is actually being made

So let me try to say what goes down the left hand side of that card, because a person who cannot name what they are becoming will default to managing what they are not.

A patience that outlasts the second and third time somebody does the same thing. A mercy that gets to the scene before the verdict does. A steadiness other people can put weight on, so that yours is the number somebody calls at eleven at night, not for answers but because you do not flinch. A gladness that does not depend on the week going well. A way of being with people that leaves them standing taller than they were.

None of that is a rule. Every one of it is a shape, and it is His shape.

You have that being formed in you now, and it is being formed rather than being enforced. The word calls us His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, and it is His Spirit and not the strength of a resolution who does the forming, which is why it holds on the days you are tired.

If naming what you are becoming has taken you somewhere darker than a blank card, do not sit at that table alone with it. Somebody brought alongside you belongs to what God is doing and never stands in for it. A doctor, if the flatness has gotten into your sleep and your body. A counselor, who can sit with the part of this that started long before January. Your pastor, or the friend who hears it with nothing trimmed off. And if the dark after the cards has carried you past regret and into a sense that the class, and everybody else, would manage perfectly well without you, do not wait for the morning. A text to 988 gets the same answer a call does, a crisis line will stay with you, and somebody can be at that table tonight. None of that is a detour away from the subject. Tonight it is the whole subject.